Of course, you can read Steve's Atom-only feed in an RSS-only newsreader such as RSS Bandit. Look:

How? Just search Google for atom2rss. There are a bunch of translators floating around. The one I picked comes from the folks at 2rss.com. Here is their translator: http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss. And they are kindly making this service available for free. You can go to the site, plug in an Atom URL, generate the corresponding RSS URL, and subscribe to that.

Sheesh. The fact that we are now going to have a war over formats that are separated by a trivial XML transformation is almost as depressing as February in New England. This cheered me up, though:

I'd like to give a big "hats off" to all the work Jon Udell is doing to make the "semantic web" a reality by looking at ways to extract information from existing (X)HTML content, and also in proposing new ways of adding semantic information to the markup for new content. If you don't already read his blog then I can't recommend it highly enough. Anyone who's involved in the reading or writing of technical blogs must surely have at least a passing interest in this sort of stuff. (BTW, I'm surprised that his work does not seem to have received much attention from the "big" blogging sites and/or engines. Unless I've missed it, of course...) [Paul's Imaginary Friend]

I've wondered about this too. My focus is on the syndication payload, not the syndication wrapper, and for my purposes it's completely irrelevant whether the wrapper is RSS, Atom, or Bob's Your Uncle. Come to think of it, maybe it's a good thing that the big sites and engines aren't focused on this stuff yet. Where there's syntax, there's the potential for another format war. What's really needed, though, is a quiet space for experimentation and organic evolution.